Home and office printers that have trays into which image receiver material sheets can be loaded and fed to a print station are well known. Such trays are usually adapted to receive several standard-sized sheets of image receiver media, such as letter (8.5″×11″ or 215.9×279.4 mm), A4 (210.0×297.0 mm), and legal (8.5″×14″ or 215.9×355.6 mm).
Often, the printers are capable of producing photo-quality prints on smaller sheets of image receiver media, such as 4″×6″ (101.6×152.4 mm) that require no more than one-half of the width of the media path through the printer. Of course these smaller sheets of image receiver media do not necessarily need to be of photo-quality material, and can be card stock, labels, or even plain paper. For convenience, the phrases “auxiliary media” and “auxiliary tray” will be used to designate any image receiver media that require no more than one-half of the width of the media path through the printer and any tray that is adapted to receive such photo media, respectively. Commercially available auxiliary trays have only a single tray and are manual in the sense that the user, after loading the tray with auxiliary media, must physically push the auxiliary tray into a position which allows the media to be picked.
Since auxiliary media sheets require no more than one-half of the width of the media path through the printer, it would be convenient to provide side by side stacks of such media sheets so that two sheets, one from one stack and the other from the other stack, can be picked simultaneously and fed through the printer at the same time. This would provide higher throughput, since two sheets can be printed simultaneously. By printing on two sheets side by side, the number of times per sheet that the carriage must be turned around to print a new swath is cut in half. This reduction in turnaround times is one factor leading to higher throughput. Another factor is the faster paper loading and ejecting of two sheets at a time. Further, it would provide additional flexibility if only a single sheet could be picked and fed through the printer so that an odd number of sheets could be printed without the requirement of feeding an extra, blank sheet through the printer.